Autonomous vehicles must safely transport
their passengers to their destination. The basic requirement for this is that
the vehicle sensors detect their surroundings correctly. Therefore, much
emphasis is placed on the validation of camera, lidar, and radar sensors
throughout the entire development process.
dSPACE Sensor
Simulation offers its users models for the sensor environment in library menus.
These models can be used to create 3-D environments that allow for inserting
road users, traffic signs, or roadside structures into the environment of the
autonomous vehicle. The menus also let the users access a material database
that contains more than 1,300 objects and 170 predefined materials. The users
can also add more objects and materials. Furthermore, the software provides
sensor models for radar, lidar, and camera sensors as well as suitable models
for testing perception, fusion, and application logics.
The development of functions for
automated driven is rather complex, not least because hardware components, such
as sensors from different manufacturers, ECUs, and driving algorithms must be
perfectly coordinated. The simulation environment
enables an easy and flexible integration of customer-specific sensor front
ends. This makes the scenarios more realistic and the sensors adaptable to the
individual use case.
“The earlier in the development
process the sensor technology is validated, the faster safe vehicles with new
functions for autonomous driving will make it to the roads. Sensor Simulation
from dSPACE offers a complete simulation environment for accelerating the
development process for autonomous driving,” says Christopher Wiegand, Product
Manager at dSPACE.
Software
Supports SIL and HIL Simulation
Sensor Simulation supports the
reuse of models and test scenarios on various platforms. Tests that the
developer creates and uses on the PC can be executed on a HIL or SIL simulator
or in the cloud. This allows for simple scaling letting the developer perform
numerous tests in a short period of time.
For Maximum
Performance: Sensor Simulation PC
Sensor Simulation runs on
high-performance PC hardware platforms. For maximum performance, dSPACE offers
the Sensor Simulation PC equipped with a high-performance graphics processing
unit on which complex, highly accurate sensor models can be executed.
dSPACE offers developers high-performance simulation environments with which the sensor systems (here at the example Lidar) can be validated simply in hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations, virtually in model-in-the-loop (MIL) simulations, or even cloud-based in software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulations.